Saturday, April 30, 2016

Why Does Peacekeeping Always Involve Killing? (Dr. No)

fig. 1: Dent in the room.


One of the more interesting aspects of Dr No is how, in contrast to its successors, it holds off on the introduction of its villain until almost an hour into the film. The eponymous evildoer begins as a name on a file folder, then a name overheard, then a voice in an empty room, ordering one of his subordinates to perform a hit on James Bond. It's a microcosm of the introduction of SPECTRE, first referenced by No in his tet-a-tet with Bond, then glimpsed fitfully until Blofeld's full reveal, five years later, in You Only Live Twice. It is, also, a macrocosm of James Bond's own introduction.

Bond is introduced after a flurry of activity. The hit on Strangways, a malfunctioning rocket, and those files on Doctor No being stolen lead to a string of phone calls before the hero is seen, first from the back, then to the reveal, and that classic line.

fig. 2: Man, if everybody wasn't already smoking in 1962, they were by the end of this.
It's a moment of effortless cool. I gave Connery the short shrift through much of this blog, but it's hard to deny the sheer magnetism of the guy. It's no mean feat to make delivering your own name sound cool, and Bond's delivery, "Bond, James Bond" isn't even his own. He's parroting Sylvia Trench here, who introduced herself a moment before in just the same way. It's a way of trumping her, mimicking her style but signifying "I'm kind of a bigger deal."

This general command of the room is what defines Bond in this first picture, and every film going forward. It's key to his appeal. He arrives in Jamaica and generally takes over the situation, issuing clipped orders to the help and his CIA contact alike. Seas of paragraphs have surely been sailed through about the fantasy appeal of the character, and it's on full display here. He's unflappable, he takes charge, he's adored by the ladies.

The spy film didn't begin with James Bond, or Dr. No. There have been espionage and intrigue movies as long as there have been movies. Much of the time, however, these films, particularly those made by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930's, were about ordinary people caught up in the workings of espionage, or of home agents defending against invasion and sabotage. Along with the more famous trappings of his sub-genre, James Bond turned a character that would have easily been a villain in, say, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and made him the center of the film. Rather than an invasion/sabotage picture, or the paranoid thriller of mistaken identity, Dr. No is an imperial film. The British agent heads out into the uncivilized world to set it all to rights.

Which, again, has been covered, by people more qualified than I am, surely. What's interesting to me, again, is this film's preoccupation with esoteric and removed spaces. This also is nothing particularly new for the genre. As early as Fritz Lang's 1928 film Spies, audiences were being introduced to the idea of secret headquareters. Where the Bond films of the Seventies would be the high point of this trend, Dr No finds the idea still in its infancy. The eponymous physicist's hideout is on a secluded island no one will willingly visit. Supposedly it contains a bauxite mine, and when Bond finally gets there he sees some of the trappings of this before being led inward into the place's truer and more sinister purpose.

fig. 3: I wonder if this is a radiation zone?

Inexplicably, the place is run by a bunch of cheery nuns, who serve no real purpose to the plot other than to accentuate the strangeness of the place. The same thing is true, generally, of the Evil Doctor's hands. Withered from exposure to radiation, Doctor No had them replaced with bionics, and while the threat of him crushing Bond to death is made explicit, all he manages in the film's finale is a couple of well-placed judo chops before the hero dispatches him.

No is an operative of SPECTRE. I'd forgotten how early on that organization rears its head. He makes his claims about the organization opposite this big fish tank. "Minnows pretending they're whales," Bond remarks. "Rather like you, Doctor."

"Depends on which side of the glass you're on," No replies. There's a host of aquatic imagery associated with SPECTRE in its early days. Doctor No and his fish, the octopus logo, Blofeld's Japanese fighting fish (as well as his boat) in From Russia with Love and his piranhas in You Only Live Twice. To say nothing of the entire plot of Thunderball. Even Honey Rider, here, is threatened with death by drowning. Minnows and sharks. Throughout this film, James Bond is never seen to be out of his element, or much more than inconvenienced by the threats against his life. It's only there, facing those minnows,that Bond seems as thoguh he's stepped into the middle of something.

fig. 4: That's some fish story.

It makes sense then that this would cast such a long shadow over the franchise. Fifty-three years on, Spectre rushes through this establishment. "You're a kite in a hurricane, Mister Bond," Mr. White tells our hero, subbing in wind for water. Ultimately, it's why the reveal in Spectre that Blofeld was, in fact, Bond's long-lost brother was so goddamn disappointing. There is no deeper water there. Doctor No refers to East and West as mere points on a map, and in its staking out a claim on the spy adventure genre, the Bond series' use of SPECTRE as antagonists played a crucial role. It emphasized the escapist aspect in a world beset by the Cold War, but also the organization served as the ultimate esoteric space. Like those secret labs and lairs just to the side of the world you know, SPECTRE is the ultimate criminal threat, existing just outside the conflict between East and West that Doctor No so quickly dismissed as petty bickering. Carried with those minnows and sharks is the promise of the strange future that is to come.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

A Photograph of Someone You Know...Years Before You Knew Them (From Russia with Love)

fig. 1: Chess is a metaphor, you guys!
Dr No introduced many of the Bond canon's tics that would be refined to perfection in Goldfinger. This leaves the middle of Sean Connery's three pictures, From Russia with Love, in a bit of an odd position. Though it deals with SPECTRE, introduced already in Dr No and curiously absent from Goldfinger, it is structured less like those other two movies, or Connery's other entries, which would all follow a similar formula. Bond never confronts Kronsteen, the architect of the plot against him, and only catches Rosa Klebb at the very end of the film. Blofeld, though depicted--this is his first appearance on film--isn't even named yet, and remains an enigma to the film's protagonist. There's less of what the later entries of the franchise would excel in: that preoccupation with hidden spaces.

Some of that is down to production designer Ken Adam--almost single-handedly repsponsible for the "look" of James Bond through the Sixties and Seventies--doing Dr Strangelove instead of this film, but also it's down to director Terrence Young, who was keen to make a more grounded, realistic film than the one that preceded it. There is one bit, a periscope in the catacombs of Istanbul (not Constantinople) that looks into the Russian embassy, but otherwise, the world is presented pretty straightforwardly.

There is, however, a first for the series, and that's Desmond Llewelyn's Q and the gadget briefing. The previous entry had a Major Boothroyd, but he came along just to switch out Bond's Baretta from the books for a Walther. The gadgetry is a bit tame by the standards the series would later rise to: it's a brief case with some hidden pockets for a flip knife, gold sovereigns, and a bit of exploding talcum powder for the unwary thief.

Bond gets the brief case in advance of his latest assignment: meet up with a Russian defector in order to secure a Lektor decoder. He's walking in to a trap and he's pretty sure he knows it, though not a trap organized by the Russians. Again, this is the work of SPECTRE, and it's a targeted bit of business in retaliation for his killing of Doctor No in the previous installment. They're out to humiliate Bond, and then murder him. The conceit advanced to the British is that a Russian cryptographer has fallen in love with Bond over a file photo of him. The British don't believe it, but figure what the hey, any chance to get a Lektor, right?

No.

The odd thing about it is, this clearly telegraphs that Bond has been made. He's a secret agent of whom the Soviets have a good enough photograph of that someone could semi-plausibly fall in love with him from it. It would seem to me at least that his value as an asset in the field is effectively zero. This becomes the first in a running gag that proliferates throughout the series: Bond as a well-known commodity. He's well enough known that SPECTRE can create a false mask of the guy to use in training exercises, because apparently you need someone who looks just like Sean Connery to teach you how to murder Sean Connery, and because it didn't occur to renowned chess master and also supercriminal Kronsteen that a fully convincing mask of James Bond could do some of this humiliate-and-discredit footwork all on its own.

That opening scene is of a piece with many of the other entries in Connery's tenure, in it's funerary bait-and-switch. It's only until the mask is pulled that the audience understands it's not James Bond, but some other schmuck. Likewise, Thunderball opens with a coffin clearly marked "JB;" You Only Live Twice begins with an elaborate fake out to both the audience, and the world of the film, that James Bond has been murdered; and Diamonds Are Forever has that bit where Connery is nearly cremated alive in his funeral suit. More than any other Bond, Connery's is the one threatened with death, even from outside the narrative.

From Russia With Love follows a form that the series more or less abandoned: that of the travelogue. Part of what made these movies so popular back in the Sixties was their ability to transport audiences to exotic locales when air travel was still a thing many Americans couldn't easily afford. Bond spends a not-at-all-germane-to-the-plot amount of time faffing about Istanbul (not Constantinople), befriending the local branch manager and getting into scrapes at a gypsy camp. It never feels overly long, but the film is clearly taking its time, luxuriating in the sense of place that would be out of character for a film today, which structures its location-switching more like video game levels: Find the thing in Port-au-Prince, move on to the Bolivia level.

If you've got a date in Constantinople...
It's fitting here as it gives the romance between Bond and Russian agent Tatiana Romanov time to breathe, even though both of them are conning the other. This makes the film structurally different than Dr. No, and than every subsequent Bond film. Indeed, the series hasn't quite yet found out what it wants to be, and From Russia presents an interesting alternate take on what the series might have become. Rather than this film climaxing at, say, a secret island base, or a volcano fortress, or a stealth boat, there is a long denouement after Bond faces the main heavy Red Grant. He and Tatiana square off against Klebb in Trieste, and a gaggle of SPECTRE goons off the Italian coast later on.

The fight with Grant, a series highlight, is interesting too in the regard that Red Grant is essentially Bond's opposite number, which is to say he's a functionary. He's not a gold-irradiating criminal or a power-mad despot. He's just a guy who's pretty good at his job. This, too, would be something the film series would largely eschew going forward. Much more dramatically satisfying for Bond to be deposing the heavy-hitters. Not only that, but the megalomaniacs Bond eventually routinely pits himself against are allowed to have some personality, some different flavor of world-conquering, which Red Grant can't. In its deliberate low-stakes, meandering storytelling, From Russia with Love represents a path not taken, a series of possibilities before the franchise became set in its ways.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

A Gambler With A Mad Thirst for Power (Goldfinger)

"To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization."

Stop me if you've heard this one: a master criminal, whose name is a play on words, plans the crime of the century, and the only person standing in his way is a stalwart defender of truth and justice, who happens to have just about the most tricked-out car in the world.

Just over a year separate the release of Goldfinger in the United States and the premiere of 1966 Batman TV series. The pair of them arrived on the heels of Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp," published in the preceding year, which brought to mainstream attention an aesthetic that would define both that TV series and the James Bond franchise. Roger Moore gets a lot of guff from Bond purists for the amount of camp his entries indulged in. Clearly, those purists must be misremembering Pussy Galore's Flying Circus, and the raft of old-timey gangsters Auric Goldfinger recruits for his attack on Fort Knox.

Goldfinger is awash with iconic moments. Oddjob and that hat of his. The laser drill scene. The Aston Martin pulling out all the stops: water jets, guns, ejector seat. Pussy Galore and her silly name. It says something that James Bond, whose name was picked by Fleming because it was so forgettable and unremarkable, should constantly run into people with names like Plenty O'Toole and Holly Goodhead and a guy who finds gold so nice he was named for it twice.

"Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture."

Auric Goldfinger is a standout antagonist for the series. (The gold standard, you might say.) Though Gert Frobe had to be dubbed, Michael Collins does good work infusing the character with the kind of urbane warmth we've come to expect from these sorts of supervillains. And his plan is a clever one: rather steal all the gold from Fort Knox, he's going to irradiate the lot of it, making it useless. He's been given a dirty bomb by the Chinese (referred to throughout this film as Red China) and with it will destabilize the US economy while at the same time making his own gold stores worth twice as much. The presence of a Chinese scientist in Doctor Ling and the small army of Chinese soldiers Goldfinger employs are this film's only considerations to real-world politics. As with SPECTRE, with whom Mr Goldfinger does not seem affiliated, the action is a shadow play, an artifice with nods toward the Cold War but not directly in the trenches. Auric Goldfinger is, first and foremost, a criminal opportunist.

The film is in fact a kind of a reverse heist movie, at least from Bond's perspective. He stumbles on to the thing after the planning has been done, after Goldfinger has brought his supplies in from different parts of the world, cleverly disguised, after the villain has recruited Ms Galore and her aviatrix squadron and planned his assault on the base in meticulous detail. We even get a scene where Goldfinger explains the whole thing, though, rather than the cliched "Bad Guy Explains The Plot To The Hero" business, it's him explaining the robbery to those gangsters, who from their own perspective thought they were in a crime film until the walls of Goldfinger's den start moving around and they realize they've stumbled into a James Bond picture.

That is, of course, before the eponymous bad guy murders them all, having got what he wanted. I guess that's the difference between when a good guy plans a heist and a bad guy plans a heist. Before his little killing spree, and right as the landscape in his den changes from "man cave" to "supervillain control room," Goldfinger explains that "Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He's fired rockets at the Moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavor...except crime!"

Seriously, whose rogues gallery could that possibly remind you of?

"[...] Among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling."
It's easy to see how the success of James Bond would inspire the creation of the Batman series. The two share so many of the same sensibilities. The Bond films created a wave of spy action imitators on the airwaves and the silver screen, including out-and-out parodies like Get Smart, which premiered in 1965. Even now, as the James Bond franchise has almost fully transitioned out of its less-than-serious roots, fans have clamored for Christopher Nolan as an ideal Bond director. Nolan, whose chilly, grounded, serious, kinda-fascist take on Batman made arguably the high-water mark of superhero films with 2008's The Dark Knight. It's not hard, watching that film, to see what Nolan's Bond films might look like. Hell, The Dark Knight goes so far as to poach the sky hook scene from Thunderball and its sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, opens on a skyjacking scene that is almost a direct lift from Licence to Kill.

But as far as Bond might stray from his roots, the character is fundamentally less elastic than Batman. With the exception of the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, which virtually every reiteration of the character across media sees fit to re-stage (one notable exception: Batman '66) Batman creators feel no particular obligation to recreate classic elements. Whereas the Bond franchise is more burdened by its own tropes. This film, as iconic as it is, casts a long shadow. Goldfinger is where all the elements that would come to define the franchise for decades are finally present and humming along beautifully. Which means, however, that it casts a shadow so large it is difficult for the character ever to entirely escape.

"Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' of irony over tragedy."

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Nae man can tether time nor tide (Thunderball)

fig. 1: Signs this movie was remade in 1983.
I'm about twenty weeks into a film retrospective I began largely because the film Spectre annoyed me so much. I did these movies in reverse order because I wanted to get to talk about the Daniel Craig films first, as they were the obvious antecedents to that film, and then the Pierce Brosnan ones, as the latter films were the first Bonds I saw in the theater. Also, Sean Connery has never quite been my favorite James Bond. He has his moments of fitful charm, but I was happy to wait him out.

One consequence of this, however, is by the time that I get to Thunderball, a film that seems on autopilot with regard to so many of the Bond canon's tics, I find I have very little actually to say about it. Particularly down to the fact that this film was remade almost twenty years later as Never Say Never Again, a much more interesting picture in terms of what it had to say about the character by telling almost the exact same story, but aging him ahead.

There were rumors/threats in the 1990's of another Thunderball remake, to be titled Warhead or Warhead 2000 AD. They obviously never came to pass and while it's easy to imagine the mathematics of diminishing returns on these, it would be worth it to see a geriatric Connery go through the undersea motions again, just to find out what we could learn from the juxtaposition between the constraints of the script and the onward press of history.

Most of the set design in this film is unremarkable. Bond spends his time mainly at a health clinic, or in and out of a hotel in the Bahamas. Even Supervillain Emilio Largo (love the name) operates out of a house that would be at home in any American suburb, give or take the pool full of man-eating sharks. Two other locations in this film, however, are much more interesting.

The first is SPECTRE HQ. The top-secret criminal syndicate operates out of a secret room in a humdrum office building in Paris. Turn down the right corridor, push the right button, as happens so often in these movies, and you're transported to a modern, stainless-steel conference hall where the top criminals of the world report to their shadowy, shuttered leader.

fig. 2: Whose job is it to polish these fixtures? Number 2000?

By contrast, take a look at the fabulously baroque, old-world hall the Double-0 agents meet in conference with M and some British and NATO bigwigs.

fig. 3: The Halls of Power
This is the only time we see--nominally, at least--what appear to be all nine of the Double-0 agents. Bond arrives late and sits seventh from left. The whole thing is just brimming with opulence, and could be confused easily for some fancy ballroom (and surely was one at one point) were it not for the tapestry that retracts and gives them a view of the world.

Contrast Thunderball's slickly ultramodern SPECTRE with the skulking-in-the-shadows version of it in 2015. And compare Spectre's Spectre, too, to what we see of MI:6 in Thunderball. Put a balcony halfway up those long walls and turn out all the lights, the rooms would be strikingly similar. They both represent institutionalized, aging power. In Thunderball, SPECTRE is a kind of nightmarish modern vision of progress, a criminal conglomerate, a monopoly on evil price-fixing heroin and consulting on the British Train Robbery.

This is notably similar to QUANTUM, the ersatz SPECTRE from 2008's Quantum of Solace, who conduct their business meetings through bluetooth ear pieces while watching modernist updates of opera. When Spectre itself came back (un-acronymed, the acronym being a very 1965 way of showing something as forward-thinking), perhaps to set itself apart, and perhaps because Sam Mendes just loves loves him some dramatic shadows, the HQ of this world crime league, now moved to Rome, located to a palace of shadowy affluence.

fig. 4: Updated
In the fifty years between these pictures SPECTRE lost the capital letters and changed from a modern sort of evil to a somber, eldritch thing, the rot at the core of the world. In the meantime, James Bond's digs became more and more modern, starting around the time of GoldenEye's big wall-screens and reaching its apex in the dueling modernities of Quantum of Solace, pitting those bluetooth head sets agasint M and Tanner's touch-screen Wall of Exposition.

Since 2008, the organization has regressed. Spectre saw M actively reject the clear-glass modernism of Andrew Scott's MI:5 for the old World War Two tunnel aesthetic from Skyfall. In terms of architecture, then, it's only the obvious money on display in Spectre's digs that separates them from those of the film's MI:6. They have come, in the end, to the same place, signifiers of old empires, their conflict now represented as the blood feud between two brothers. What older story is there?

Couldn't resist, even if God is displeased with sacrifices of low-hanging fruit.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

You Will Become My Perpetual Opponent (You Only Live Twice)



fig. 1: Mickey Rooney


Ugh.

Where to begin?

Some trivia: The screenplay for this film was written by Roald Dahl, as a kind of a swap with Fleming, where Fleming wrote the screenplay adapting Dahl's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Either as a result of this or because the producers couldn't quite swing their original plan of adapting On Her Majesty's Secret Service just yet, much of the plot of the novel went out the window. It marks the first full-on glimpse of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played here by Donald Pleasance in a performance that would be readily parodied in decades to come. Pleasance plays Blofeld as a slimy little creep, and we finally get our first look at him just as James Bond does.

It's a build-up audiences were waiting for since the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love, which first introduced the character, and SPECTRE. This was, however, Pleasance's only turn in the role. Blofeld would be played two years later by Telly Savalas--who, despite his baldness, bears zero resemblance in his portrayal to Pleasance--and two years after that by Charles Gray, who again switches up the character traits, making him cheerily, urbanely evil.

fig.2 John Wayne
One element went largely unchanged from the novel of You Only Live Twice to the book: In order to get close to Blofeld's hideout, James Bond must disguise himself as a Japanese fisherman, meaning Connery spends about a half hour or so of this film in yellowface. There is, in fact, an unsettling, long tradition of yellowface in Hollywood, outlasting blackface by decades. There are all sorts of reasons for this, and I'm not political-science literate enough to go in to all of them. Suffice it to say that instead of just refusing to tell stories about East Asian people (as they largely did for Black people) Hollywood just subbed in White actors to play East Asian characters.

fig. 3: Warner Oland

The tradition of yellowface goes back at least as far as the beginnings of cinema, because racism. The most prominent early examples are the Charlie Chan series of films starring Warner Oland, a Swedish actor in heavy makeup who played the titular detective in sixteen movies throughout the 1930's. Chan would go on to be played by White actors Sidney Toler (twenty-one films!) , Roland Winters (six films), and J. Carrol Naish (TV series: forty episodes), not getting an actual Asian actor until the Seventies when Keye Luke played him. Oh, but fret not. He'd be played later by other White actors, including one of my favorite performers, Peter Ustinov.

fig. 4: Luise Rainer
Worse offenders (we have to grade on kind of a curve here) are films like The Good Earth, an adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's runaway best-selling novel, also made in the Thirties. As far as that film goes, all the leads are played by White actors, anyone with whom the audience is meant to sympathize is White, and the background extras, well, you can guess about them. Producers of the film lobbied Actual Chinese American actress Anna May Wong for the role of the film's villain. Wong politely told them to go to Hell.

Wong is a tremendous example of the damaging effects of this kind of Hollywood-mandated racism. A mesmerizing performer, she wasn't even considered for the lead. A third-generation American, Wong was pigeonholed into Butterfly and Dragon-Lady roles throughout her career, encountering hostility in her ancestral country and typecasting in America.


fig. 5: Sean Connery

In the novel, Bond is made up to look Japanese in order to pose as a coal miner and get closer to Blofeld's organization. This works right up until his confrontation with the evil mastermind and the ensuing fight, which leaves Bond with amnesia, believing himself to be a Japanese fisherman until he reads his own obituary. In the film, the ruse is simply to get him geographically closer to the secret volcano lair of SPECTRE. It never comes up, and by the time Bond swims over to Blofeld's volcano fortress, the whole business has washed off just in time for the climactic fight.

You could argue SPECTRE's goons are active in the surrounding fishing villages, and that Bond--who makes about as convincing a Japanese as your average 6'2'' Scotsman--needed to blend in, but this whole business could have been excised completely from the film without much hand-waving.

fig. 6: Christopher Lee

It's a shame, because there are things to like about this movie. Much like the later Roger Moore films, the sets in You Only Live Twice are just frigging dynamite. The volcano lair gets much attention (And it should: that monorail, yo.) but Tiger Tanaka's office is also great, the sets at the Osata corporation are fantastic in this mod Sixties fashion, and the cavernous workings of US Central Command, where the Men in Charge watch events transpire at a tremendous remove are well worth looking at also. Tanaka himself is an enjoyable presence, even dubbed. This is a stylish film, and set designer Ken Adam deserves a lot of credit.

Unfortunately it has aged just astonishingly poorly.

fig. 7: Scarlett Johansson (Honorable Mention)

Bosh Bosh Bosh Loads of Money (Casino Royale [1967])

"Fire my agent."
There are times it is painful to be a completist.

If 1967's Casino Royale is half as clever as it thinks it is, it will go down as one of the great comic masterpieces of all time. That most people don't even know it exists tells you how that turned out for everyone.

Backing up: It's 1967. Five years since Dr. No and arguably the height of the spy-fi genre. The airwaves and silver screens are flooded with parodies, pastiches, and cash-ins. Now, way back in 1954, Ian Fleming sold the rights to his first novel, Casino Royale, for a six hundred dollars. The book was adapted into an episode of the American anthology TV series Climax! and would bounce about during the Sixties before producer Charles Feldman bought them, intending at first to produce a straight James Bond film. He even went so far as to approach Sean Connery, and when he couldn't get him, twisted the plot of Casino Royale around toward a parody. The film rights to Fleming's novel would languish for decades after before eventually going to Sony, which has the current lease on the character, in 1999, for ten million dollars.

As spoofs and homages go, Casino Royale is the only one with pedigree. It's the only spy spoof that can have a character named James Bond (played by David Niven, Ian Fleming's original choice for the character) offer commentary of the genre popularized by films starring a character named James Bond. Thing is, this meta-commentary is disingenuous. Niven's Bond bemoans the fact that "secret agent has become synonymous with 'sex maniac,'" but that's what those books were. The original film adaptations of Fleming's novels were fairly faithful to the source material (except You Only Live Twice, also released in '67). Niven's Bond is a refined, eccentric British gentleman, who declares spying an alternative to outright war, but for whom it feels more like a diversion, an outlet for his eccentricities, a hobby. Niven never gives the sense, in this movie or any other I've seen him in, as particularly exerting himself at anything.

Perhaps Niven's Bond is speaking more to the rest of the genre that sprang up over his filmic alter-ego. [[put list here, instead]] In an effort to out-Bond Bond, these parodies and pastiches upped the camp factor, upped the gadget factor, and way upped the girl factor.

Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, and Neil Connery
Incidentally, 1967 was also the year of Operation: Kid Brother, a James Bond pastiche that starred Neil Connery, of all people, Sean Connery's dentist brother. I saw Kid Brother (aka Operation Double 007, aka OK Connery) ages ago on Mystery Science Theater 3000 rerun. I didn't have the strength to watch it again, but it's free on Amazon Prime if you ever wanted to watch a Professional Dentist act. Operation: Kid Brother is notable in that it stars Bernard Lee (who played M from Dr. No through Moonraker, and Lois Maxwell, who played Miss Moneypenny until the end of Roger Moore's tenure in the role. They basically reprise their roles from the series with the serial numbers filed off, a fact which very much irritated Sean Connery, who felt the film made his brother a joke. Other Bond alumni include Adolfo Celi (Thunderball) and Daniela Bianchi (From Russia with Love). Kid Brother belongs to the genre of the Eurospy film. Eurospy films were cranked out at a fast clip in the mid-Sixties, pastiches or parodies of James Bond that capitalized on the trend in the way spaghetti westerns, made on the cheap in Italy, were meant to capitalize on that genre.

There are some funny bits in Casino Royale, but only if you, like me, are partial to Dad Jokes. Casino Royale is a very Dads' Interest film, employing not only lame puns, but also an entire regiment of lissome lady thespians to lob juvenile sexual innuendo that in 1967 was probably pretty racy. It bears a strong resemblance to the Carry On! series of films in that regard, the kind of ham-fisted attention grabbing that throws pretty girls and eye-roller jokes at the wall to distract you from the fact that nothing is really happening. Sometimes this works. Just as often it does not.

Some memorably off-kilter set design as well.
Not helping matters is that the production of this film was, by all accounts, a complete disaster. Orson Welles and Peter Sellers couldn't stand each other, and both arrived on set laboring under the delusion that they were involved in a serious picture. Shooting went long and the final cost of the film was almost twice the six million dollars originally budgeted. It arrived to middling reviews

An interesting note: this film is the first instance of what would become a popular (but easily discredited) fan theory surrounding the character of James Bond: that the name is a code name. That Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan and Roger Moore all had different names, that the name "Bond" is as much a designation as "007." In Casino Royale, the original Sir James Bond recruits his old flame Vesper Lynd, some dude who was famous in 1967, a professional baccarat player, and his own daughter (by Mata Hari!) to work under the name "James Bond 007," a largely nonsensical gag that Niven's character seems to grow increasingly tired of, despite having invented it.

Mata Bond. Looking pretty good for fifty.


About fifteen minutes of this two-hour picture is devoted to the classic elements of Fleming's novel. A man, named James Bond, facing off against a man, named Le Chiffre in a game of baccarat in order to bankrupt Le Chiffre. Everything else that swirls about it, including an interminable sequence in Scotland at the beginning of the film and a chaotic battle played for wacky laffs at the film's end, is a nonsensical parade of half-baked ideas, limp jokes, and visual gags that sometimes work.


Also, there is a flying saucer.